The sea of people on the ground were there for M.I.A. at the Siren Music Festival.
Judging Nuyorican's open mike slamI just spent the last two nights at two legendary downtown spots for slam poetry: the Bowery Poetry Club and the Nuyorican Poets Café. In my next life I would like to come back as a slam poet. The competitors at the Bowery's East Coast Regional Slam - hailing from NYC, Boston, Jersey, Columbus, and Baltimore-DC - were some of the most rhythmic, articulate, ballsy, and entrancing people I have ever seen on stage.
The Nuyorican hosts an open slam on Wednesdays, drawing much fewer people than it's famous Friday slams. It was still a lot of fun and a great showcase for local talent. Jake and I helped judge the competitors, which ranged from cringe-worthy to very impressive. One of my favorites was a woman who faked a spot-on orgasm, no pun intended. Needless the say, the male judge at another table was less impressed.
Natural air conditioningJacob and I are spending a summer without air-conditioning in the apartment. Half of the reason was cost (machine and electricity), and the other half was environmental. Which doesn't mean we're spending our free time inside on 90 degree days. Parks in New York are, on average, 10 to 15 degrees cooler than anywhere else outdoors in the city. Tonight we escaped to Central Park, spread a blanket out, and enjoyed the cool plushiness of the grass as we ate baguette and camembert. Nature's air conditioning...what could be better?
Gridskipper also posted a map of gardens in NYC where you can enjoy cool plushy grass and look at nice flowers. Manhattan is the only borough without an official "botanical garden", but it does have the Conservatory Gardens in Central Park and Fort Tryon's Cloisters.
Which goes to show there are options for cooling off in hot hot hot temperatures besides sitting on your AC all day.
A beautiful day on the lake...
...or .01% of the lake.
America: a country with some of the planet's best outdoor spots, and the planet's most worried and litigious people.
Over the weekend Vickie, Andrew, Jacob, and I went hiking in the Shawnangunks (aka the Gunks) near New Paltz. Near the trailhead was a large, beautiful lake ripe for swimming. Sure enough, there was a crowded "beach", complete with changing rooms, lifeguards, and sunbathers in beach chairs. The problem? The area allowed for swimming was about the side of my living room. The worst part? Nobody else swimming or sunbathing seemed to care, or even notice, that they were roped off from nature.
Luckily, about 5 miles into our hike, we found a pristine and virtually empty beach with a much larger swimming area. The water also looked clean enough to drink. The best part: with no kids around, the urine content was probably zilch.
Along with tube-shaped pasta and thick udon noodles, dumplings are the food that I crave most often. (What can I say? I'm a carb addict.) So I was happy to find Gridskipper's dumpling map of NYC, though it only has 5 places listed. I would add Yeah Shanghai Deluxe (65 Bayard St., btwn Mott & Elizabeth) to the list: the most daydream-worthy soup dumplings this side of the Pacific.
If only big-budget American movies can be this good.
Last night we went to a screening of The Banquet, which opened the New York Asian Film Festival. Billed as the Chinese Hamlet, it stars Zhang Ziyi as the younger, ass-kicking version of Gertrude and Daniel Wu as the crowned prince. The story is set in 907 A.D, complete with period costumes, swords, and martial arts choreography by Yuen Wo-ping, who also worked on Crouching Tiger and Kill Bill. As is expected, much blood is shed in an artsy way.
I haven't read Hamlet since 12th-grade English, and have pretty much forgotten the storyline other than it has something to do with revenge and poison. But there's really no need to read the Clif notes before seeing the film. There are enough ingenius cuts and balletic slow-mo violence to appeal to both action-lovers and aesthetes. The climax, taking place at a lavish banquet, appropriately enough, goes from one heart-stopping surprise to the next without missing a beat. Remembering how Shakespeare's story actually went would probably have made the movie less exciting.
Writers like coffee. Writers also like extended periods of internet connectivity to go with their coffee.
As someone who has spent a lot of time working on the go, I've compiled a list of cafés around New York with not only free WiFi but also a nice atmosphere conducive to getting lots 'o work done. (Which means, Dunkin' Donuts on 2nd Ave., you're out. You had spotty WiFi anyway.)
88 Orchard
88 Orchard (at Broome), Lower East Side, 212-228-8880
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery (bwtn E. 1st & 2nd Sts.), East Village, 212-614-0505
Columbus Cafe
556 Columbus Ave. (at 87th St.), Upper West Side, 212-721-9040
Downtown Uptown Cafe Lounge
1626 Second Avenue (btwn 84th & 85th Sts.), Upper East Side, 212-327-1327
Earth Matters
177 Ludlow St. (bwtn E. Houston and Stanton Sts.), Lower East Side, 212-475-4180
Gizzi's Coffee
16 W 8th St, West Village (bwtn MacDougal St. & 5th Ave.), West Village, 212-260-9700
Lalita Java Espresso Bar and Coffee Lounge
210 East Third St. (at Ave. B), 212-228-8448
Yesterday I hopped on my bike again after a week-and-a-half absence, and rode from my apartment on 151st St. to Battery Park on the Hudson River Greenway (aka west side bike path.) About 22 miles round-trip and twice my usual commute.
What I realized, despite the craziness of the city sometimes, is that the Greenway is pretty much New York at its finest. You can ride from the bottom tip of Manhattan to the upper tip on a scenic route that is almost car-free. It is calm and quiet. You see that fellow New Yorkers do relax, as you swish by all the sunbathers, tennis players, fishermen, moms with strollers, rollerbladers, joggers, and other cyclists. You are right next to the West Side Highway, but the honking gas-spewers are more background noise you can tune out than a potential hazard. The ride restored my faith in the city, two months away from my escape from the madness.
Granted, the Greenway isn't perfect. Rush hour in the summer can bring the onslaught of spandex-clad rich guys on $5000 bikes pretending they're on the Tour de France, swerving between bike commuters and pedestrians. There are sporadic dips into traffic, especially the rather confusing break between 125th and 130th Sts. And Carl Nacht's and Eric Ng's Ghost Bikes serve as sobering reminders of the tragedies that can occur if we don't continue to push for increased safety.
The PEN World Voices (NY Festival of International Literature) was in town a few weeks ago. I had decided to buy tickets for a panel discussion called "Voyage and Voyeur: Travel and Travel Writing"; the speakers included Alain de Botton and Ma Jian. Whenever I plan to go hear a writer speak, I like to prepare by reading at least something he/she has written. Thus I bought and started reading Ma Jian's Red Dust.
Mother Jones called it a "Sino-beatnik travelogue" and Time Magazine said it was "the Chinese equivalent of On the Road." As much as I like Kerouac, Red Dust is one of those books that captures the need for escape and the sublime freedom of travel, without the ego of many of the Beat and pseudo-Beat writers. Ma Jian was a Beijing artist who faced political persecution, and decided to escape to China's interior. For three years he walked and hitched through some of China's harshest and most remote regions, including Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia. After he escaped to Hong Kong, he wrote a book on the experience, long before he had even heard of a genre called travel writing.
